Star Wars: The Force Awakens: The complete collection of EW stories

As part of Entertainment Weekly’s new double-issue devoted to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, we spent the week rolling out features, interviews, and photo galleries about the upcoming film.

The goal was to go light on spoilers (there’s nothing here that director J.J. Abrams thinks will ruin anything going in) but we went deep on behind-the scenes details — with a few theories thrown in for fun.

If you want to get the print edition, with Han Solo, Finn, Rey, and R2-D2 and C-3PO on the covers, you can buy copies here For now, here’s the full collection of EW’s recent online stories about Lucasfilm’s return to the galaxy:

During a morning spent at his personal airplane hangar, one simple reason for Harrison Ford’s long-standing discomfort with his Star Wars character starts to reveal itself. Here is the hard truth that some, and Ford himself, may find difficult to accept: Harrison Ford is totally Han Solo.

Now we see there’s a third element to Finn’s snowy, woodlands duel with Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren. Rey is part of the battle, too. We don’t know how she fits in (although this looks a lot like the trailer shot of her weeping over a fallen friend), but as the Darth Vader-obsessed villain ignites the unstable blade of his saber, the untrained Finn is looking pretty unsure of himself. “Obviously that makes things a bit more tricky for Finn,” Boyega says. “That’s genuine fear.”

Also known as: 27 short stories about Star Wars: The Force Awakens. We tread lightly on spoilers, but dive into the design of Rey’s desert speeder, Finn’s “real fear” in his lightsaber duel, and how the final day of shooting was an evil, rainy nightmare.

One thing we haven’t seen, at least not in any detail, is the character Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong’o plays in Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Maz Kanata, the diminutive alien who narrates the recent TV spot. J.J. Abrams and Nyong’o tell us what we need to know about this 1,000-year-old being …

For those frustrated by the lack of information about Supreme Leader Snoke, Andy Serkis feels your pain. When he started work on Star Wars: The Force Awakens as the performance-capture character, he had no idea either. “It’s the first time I’ve been on set not yet knowing what the character’s gonna look like. I mean, talk about secrecy!” the actor says.

Luke Skywalker has gone from hero to MacGuffin. Film aficionados know the term, popularized by Alfred Hitchcock, as the object or mystery that drives the story – more Maltese Falcon than Millennium Falcon. It’s the thing the heroes are trying to find, or understand. It’s the puzzle they’re trying to unlock.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens revealed some new scenes as part of ABC’s Thursday night of dramas, with a slightly altered TV spot aimed primarily at the non-geek audience. But there were plenty of dog whistles in those few seconds to tantalize the die-hard fans.

The giant planet-like weapon hovering in the upper right corner of the official poster for Star Wars: The Force Awakens had fans wondering: What the hell is THAT? J.J. Abrams teases some details about the command center for the Imperial remnant known as the First Order – and the man who rules over them.

John Boyega plays the conscience-stricken, AWOL stormtrooper Finn, and Daisy Ridley is the abandoned, desert scrounger Rey. They’re both figures searching for a place to belong in the galaxy, and their mere presence in The Force Awakens – provides its own renewed sense of belonging for fans who’ve longed to see a person of color or a woman at the fore of a Star Wars story.

Details on how the roly-poly droid from Star Wars: The Force Awakens was created – and do its makers think of it as a “he” or a “she”? Creature shop chief Neal Scanlan calls the droid “a Swiss Army Knife that shouldn’t be trusted.”

From the getup of a classic Ewok to the new BB-8 droid, costumes and props from decades of Star Wars movies are going on display in New York City’s Times Square. Opening in Discovery Times Square on Nov. 14, Star Wars and the Power of Costume: The Exhibition is a partnership between Discovery, the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, and Lucasfilm, and features dozens of artifacts from the iconic films.

“Craftsmanship and artistry in costume design are valued creative components in the Star Wars saga,” George Lucas said in a release. “The detailed precision of a design can be as bold a measure of storytelling as words on a page, leading to truths at the core of a character, situation or shared history. From initial concept drawings to complex physical constructions, the costumes featured in this exhibition serve to further define crucial aspects of worlds created to move, educate and entertain us—to inspire the imagination.”

Ahead, 11 exclusive photos from the expansive exhibit.

Discovery Times Square

How long does it take to put together an exhibit that encompasses more than 30 years of movie magic, more than 70 costumes, and an entire galaxy far, far away? Five years. Well, 10, if you start counting from the moment the Lucas Archives wanted to work with the Smithsonian.

Gwendoline Christie, the Game of Thrones actress who plays the villainous First Order officer in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, says the story takes a matter-of-fact approach to Captain Phasma’s gender – and that seems to be part of her appeal.